Love in a Fallen City

By Eileen Chang
Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury and Eileen Chang
"Eileen Chang is the fallen angel of Chinese literature." ！Ang Lee

It all began when Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics, chanced upon a mention of this twentieth-century master of the novella in a footnote to an obscure reference book. He had never heard of Eileen Chang, but instinct told him he should seek her out. Chang, it seemed, had been a major celebrity of Chinese literature when she burst onto the Shanghai scene in the midst of the Second World War！a dazzling young woman decked out in clothes of her own design, writing short witty essays about the social foibles of her contemporaries, and publishing a series of novellas whose sustained poetic intensity was matched by the acuteness of their observation of fraught relationships between men and women, parents and children. Chang's fortunes took a turn for the worst after the Revolution, but she had by no means been forgotten. By the 1990s her work had been rediscovered by the Chinese-speaking world, leading to what has since become known as "Chang fever."*

Frank explains the fascination: "I borrowed one of Chang's most famous works, 'The Golden Cangue,' from the library and was astonished. Here was an entrancing writer with a voice all her own; a hypnotic story-teller, a master of character and dialogue; somebody who could bring all sorts of people to life, charming, foolish, abject, even the monstrous, and always with a sympathetic touch！exactly the sort of thing we were looking for in NYRB Classics. For me Chang has been a wonderful literary discovery, and I was eager to bring news of her to other English-language readers."

Now "Chang Fever" is poised to overtake America: Ang Lee is currently shooting a film adaptation of one of her later stories, Lust, Caution, which is scheduled for release in 2007.